Monthly Archives: August 2012

The Help Desk is located in the Learning Studio on the ground floor of Sprague. The hours are 8am-5pm, including lunch hour. Please send a support request via our request form or send us email at helpdesk@hmc.edu or call us at (909) 607 7777.

Course Mailing Lists

You should have received an email message about the course mailing lists that you own. For any questions or help with mailing lists, please contact the Help Desk.

Sakai Updates

Fall 2012 courses have been created and populated with students and faculty. As a reminder, we are now running imports from the student information system three times per day (rather than once a night!) to add students as they add courses, and will also inactivate students who drop courses.

Learning Studio Classroom Reservation
You can view and request reservations for the Fletcher Jones Classroom in the Learning Studio in VEMS. The advantage to using VEMS is that you can see right away whether the classroom is available. You can find VEMS at http://emsweb.claremont.edu/HMC/. You can also contact the Help Desk or F&M for reservations.

Course Mudd Shots

Course Mudd Shots have been updated for the semester. They are available at http://www.internal.hmc.edu/dir/courses/. The pages are restricted to the HMC network only, so if you are off-campus, please connect to the VPN first.

VPN (Virtual Private Network)

We would like to remind you about the availability of the VPN. The VPN software allows you to connect to the HMC network to use HMC and Claremont-only resources when connecting to the Internet via an ISP. The VPN also encrypts network traffic, so if you are connecting to an unknown or potentially unsafe network, logging onto the VPN first will encrypt all traffic going through the potentially unsafe network. Visit http://vpn.claremont.edu and select the GROUP as HMC-LDAP. Log in with the same username and password you use to access Sakai (but without the @hmc at the end of your username).

I wanted to draw your attention to the HMC password policy which was approved by Cabinet in November 2011. It is designed to urge people to maintain strong passwords on HMC systems, which is one important part of protecting shared College resources.

If you are interested in learning more about tools that can help you manage your passwords, take a look at an excellent report that Jeho Park and Calvin Tong produced at http://goo.gl/Oew5k

I first started working on a password policy when urged to do so by the College’s financial auditors MossAdams. I would like to thank the groups and individuals that helped craft the password policy:

If you have not reset your passwords in over 365 days, you should do so. We will be working with each department to ensure a smooth transition to this new system. You can change your password any time you like using the password and account management portal. Once we have worked directly with each department, we will turn on the feature that requires a password change every 365 days.

Thank you for your understanding and your efforts to increase the security of our systems.